Is Your Nervous System Working or Overworking? A New Way to Understand Stress and Healing
Can Stress Be “Beautiful”???
Now this may be hard to hear but hear me out. The beauty of stress is that we can all relate to it. We’ve all been there or are there currently. Stress is very relatable because to be honest how could we not feel stressed. With how the world feels right now, massive changes in our policies, transitions, quick and scary changes, social media giving us all of it at the tip of our hands, and the increase in anxiety.
It’s all there right in our face.
More than ever we need resourcing to help support our nervous system and stress response. We need some insight on how we view ourselves when we are stressed and the labels we put on our experience. Because I would argue that those labels we put on ourselves change the way stress is processed (or unprocessed) in our body. It will compact the stress or it will allow some movement to happen to help it flow through us and not stick. Stuck stress is the mess that adds layers to our health through chronic fatigue, autoimmune diseases, heart conditions, addictions, difficulty with our body and food, etc.
According to the Stanford Report, “one reason that how you think about stress matters is because it changes how you respond to stress. Viewing stress as harmful leads people to cope in ways that are less helpful, whether it’s getting drunk to “release” stress, procrastinating to avoid stress, or imagining worst-case scenarios.”
It goes on to give a beautiful example of how to be with anxiety. Say for instance your heart starts beating fast…what if you start to be with that sensation from a place of your mindset taking that in as, “my body is trying to give me the energy needed to rise to the challenge.” Just imagine for a moment how that might feel to be in your body that way and to be with this sensation this way. Trusting in it. Letting that stress take you through that challenge instead of away.
How beautiful.
Rethinking Nervous System Health: Working vs. Overworking
In Somatic Therapy, Polyvagal Theory, and an Nervous system approach, there is often language around how to describe the nervous system. Often words like “regulation” and “dysregulation” are used to describe the nervous system. Regulation is tied to the sense of flow, connection, ease, calm, greater sense of capacity to be with things, etc. Dysregulation is then used to describe when the body is in overwhelm, not able to sit still, emotional overload, out of control of body and emotions, in survival mode, etc.
These words can be so helpful when learning to distinguish the differences the nervous system can have in experience and how the body may respond. I know I used this language when I was working in a school with children identified with experiencing a inner world of Autism/ADHD. When their bodies with move to survival mode, it was so helpful to know what was going on and use words like dysregulation to help see that they were not intentionally making their bodies move into flight or fight. That it was a response of their nervous system and how best could we support their bodies when they were experiencing dysregulation.
However, now I see that word being over simplified in ways that I fear carry some inner judgement around it. For instance, there seems now to be such a focus on having the nervous system ALWAYS be in a state of regulation. That calm gets priority and feelings that may cause dysregulation (sadness, anger, rage, anxiety) are looked down upon and need to be fixed. This can create inner conflict then when we focus and put pressure on ourselves that we always need or should be “regulated”.
What if instead we play around with some other ways to describe the nervous system?
For instance, a more compassionate approach is recognizing when your nervous system is working versus when it’s over or under working. Seeing the ability our nervous system has to be in both the rest/digest AND the fight/flight/freeze/fawn response without getting stuck. That to be is a system that is working, when their is flow between both.
When we are stuck in one place in the system then we can use words like over-working to help get a sense that our nervous system is stuck in a place of trauma. There can be power to even being able to acknowledge that, particularly in the moment when we can sense what is happening. Then we are flooded by the experience but can help get out adult self back online to help support that overworking system from needing to take over (as it perhaps needed to when we were a child, or in the place of trauma).
Signs Your Nervous System is Overworking
Here can be some signs that your nervous system is overworking:
Chronic stress
Anxiety
Burnout systems (lacking motivation, feeling isolated, exhaustion, etc.)
Feeling emotionally overwhelmed or shut down
Physical systems like tension, fatigue, or digestive issues
High levels of cortisol
Clenching your jaw
Negative self-talk
Spiral thinking patterns
Dissociating
Brain fog
Autoimmune Disorders
How to Support a “Working” Nervous System
Somatic healing techniques can be so powerfully helpful in supporting the nervous system to begin to trust the body and move back into unlocking the holding patterns that have been keeping it stuck. Somatic Yoga brings awareness and connection with your emotions and feelings.
Using grounding techniques, you make choices with your body, take effective action, and create rhythms and flow. This type of yoga finds ways to safely come back to the body through supportive movements, breathing, and meditation. This can also help emotional awareness skills to recognize stress patterns before they escalate.
Therapeutic Vinyasa focuses on breath-led movement to guide the body/mind system into a greater sense of ease.
This type of yoga practice uses the ideas of energies of the spine to help bring what is needed to support the body/mind system. Mindfulness and self-regulation practices help to restore balance.
We focus on different functions like digestion, rest, awake and alert, reducing stress, grief, anxiety, etc.
A Compassionate Approach to Nervous System Healing
Instead of forcing regulation, create safe and supportive environment for your nervous system to work efficiently. This means building skills that increase THE CAPACITY so that our nervous system then can flow with what that experience is, even if it contains high stress.
Self-compassion and gentle nervous system care is crucial to the work of re-training the nervous system into a greater sense of stabilization and ease. Be kinds to yourself in this process and gather up support you need to help work with your nervous system. We are not meant to do this alone.
If you are interested in our Somatic Yoga or Therapeutic Vinyasa classes, please feel free to check out our schedule here.
Warmly,
Leslie
